What We Want & What We Think We Want

That summer was going to be pack with big-name movies, so the theaters were being picky. 20^th Century Fox had a movie they thought might make some money but only 40 theaters wanted it. What the rest of them wanted was “The Other Side of Midnight”, a steamy adult-themed adaptation of a bestselling book by the same name. The other movie was just a hero adventure of good vs evil that theaters felt was too sappy for modern audiences.

So 20^th Century Fox played dirty. They told the theaters that the only way they could get “The Other Side of Midnight” is if they would also show the other movie they were promoting. This was illegal and would get them fined 25,000 dollars, but they didn’t seem to mind.

It not because “The Other Side of Midnight” did so well, but because the other movie did. While “The Other Side of Midnight” made a modest 24 million, the other movie “Star Wars” made 775 Million!

It‘s not just theaters that don’t always know what is best for them, people do it all the time. What we think will make us happy in the end brings us misery. The steamy dive into the passing pleasure of sin leads us not to fulfillment but disillusionment. The story is as old as time. See Solomon empty pursuits in Ecclesiastes or the prodigal son trip in the far land. What we chase after might not be the thing that is going to bring us the best return.

Don’t make the mistake of falling for the other side of the road. What we think we want maybe a crumbling illusion but what we want is to have an eternal promise of good.

Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, "I have no delight in them";

Ecclesiastes 12:1

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog